Ecommerce · 5 min read
Shopify vs WooCommerce in 2027: which is better for an Indian store?
Costs, payments, GST, shipping and control compared for Indian sellers, plus the kind of store each platform suits best.
If you are starting an online store in India, you will hit this question in the first week: Shopify or WooCommerce? Between them they run millions of stores. Both can look beautiful. The differences show up later, in your monthly costs, in how much control you have, and in who you have to call when something breaks.
Here is how they compare for Indian sellers going into 2027, with the fees that most comparison articles written for American stores leave out.
Our honest one-paragraph answer
Choose Shopify if you want to launch quickly, don’t have anyone technical, and value not worrying about hosting or security. Choose WooCommerce if you want full ownership, lower per-order fees at volume, deep customisation, or you already run a WordPress site with content that ranks. For a brand doing a few hundred orders a month, either works. At a few thousand orders a month, the fee difference starts to matter a lot.
The fee difference Indian sellers need to know about
Shopify’s own payment service, Shopify Payments, is not available in India. Indian stores use gateways like Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree instead. On Shopify, that means you pay the gateway’s fee (typically around 2% on standard plans) and a Shopify transaction fee for using a third-party gateway: about 2% on the Basic plan, lower on higher plans. Add a monthly subscription, billed in rupees with 18% GST on top.
On WooCommerce there is no platform fee at all. You pay the gateway’s fee, your hosting and any paid extensions. Check Shopify’s current India pricing page before you decide, because plans and rates change, but the structure has been the same for a long time.
A quick worked example
Take a store selling ₹10 lakh a month online. A 2% Shopify transaction fee on the Basic plan is ₹20,000 a month, on top of gateway fees and the subscription. Moving up a plan lowers that fee but raises the subscription. On WooCommerce, the same ₹20,000 could pay for very good managed hosting and a proper maintenance plan several times over. At ₹1 lakh a month in sales, the difference is small and Shopify’s convenience easily wins.
Side by side for Indian stores
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Launch speed | Fast | Moderate |
| Hosting and security | Managed by Shopify | Your responsibility (or your developer’s) |
| Monthly platform cost | Subscription plus apps | Hosting plus any paid extensions |
| Fee per order | Gateway fee plus Shopify’s third-party fee | Gateway fee only |
| UPI, cards, net banking | Through Razorpay and others | Through Razorpay and others |
| Cash on delivery rules | Good, more via apps | Very flexible, custom rules possible |
| GST invoices | Via apps | Via plugins or custom code |
| Customisation | Within Shopify’s structure | Almost unlimited |
| Content and blogging | Basic | Excellent (it’s WordPress) |
| Who owns the platform | You rent it | You own it |
Stores that suit Shopify
- D2C brands launching fast, where marketing is the priority and nobody wants to think about servers.
- Founders without a technical person on the team.
- Stores with fairly standard catalogues: fashion, beauty, accessories, gifting.
- Brands that expect big traffic spikes from sales or influencer campaigns and don’t want to plan hosting for them.
Stores that suit WooCommerce
- Businesses already running a WordPress site with content that ranks on Google.
- Stores with unusual rules: B2B pricing tiers, GST-inclusive and exclusive pricing for different customers, custom product builders, local delivery slots.
- Sellers with healthy volume who want to stop paying a percentage of every sale to the platform.
- Businesses that want complete control of their data and code.
The costs nobody puts in the comparison
Shopify apps
Reviews, WhatsApp notifications, GST invoices, COD verification, product filters and loyalty programmes are often separate apps with their own monthly fees. Five or six apps can quietly cost more than the plan itself.
WooCommerce upkeep
Someone has to update WordPress, WooCommerce and plugins, keep backups and watch security. That is a real monthly cost, which we break down in our website maintenance cost guide. Skip it, and you are gambling with the store.
Which is better for SEO?
Both can rank well. WooCommerce gives you more control over URLs, structured data and content, and inherits WordPress’s strong blogging tools. Shopify is solid out of the box but less flexible, for example in URL structure. In practice, product data, content, site speed and reviews decide rankings far more than the platform does.
Can you switch later?
Yes. Products, customers and orders can be moved either way. The risky part is SEO: every old URL needs to redirect to its new one, or you lose rankings you worked hard for. If you ever migrate, read our guide to redesigning without losing rankings first.
What it costs to build either one
Build costs are similar for the same design and features. The bigger money is in design quality, catalogue set-up and integrations. See our ecommerce website development cost guide for 2027 budgets by store size.
How we recommend
We ask about expected order volume, how unusual your business rules are, who will run the store day to day and how much content marketing you plan to do. Then we put the three-year cost of each option side by side before anyone commits. If that sounds useful, our ecommerce development team is happy to do it for your store.
